DARK SKY

Author: Carla Neggers ISBN: 077832205X 8/2005 SUSPENSE Publisher: MIRA

Deputy U:S. Marshal Juliet Longstreet has made her share of enemies, and now one of them is out of prison and threatening to kill her. Her mission: find him first. But hot on her suspect's trail is Special Forces officer Ethan Brooker, who has a way of dropping into Juliet's life without warning. Haunted by his wife's death, Ethan is a man Juliet knows she should avoid. And now he's focused on a related mission of his own and can't—or won't—give Juliet any details. When she finds her doorman dead and her New York apartment ransacked, Juliet tracks down Ethan—this time she wants answers. They agree to team up, and as they fight their growing attraction to each other, their race to stop a ruthless killer takes them north to Juliet's family in Vermont...and into the heart of a dangerous web of lies, greed, deceit—and murder.

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

Fans of Neggers' THE RAPIDS and NIGHT'S LANDING, which were out last year, will be thrilled to see secondary characters Deputy US Marshal Juliet Longstreet and Special Forces officer Ethan Brooker back together again for their own adventure and love story.

Because it's a sequel to two books, there's a lot of information "dumping" for the new reader that can slow the pace, or get confusing at times. Readers of the other books will just jump over it and want to get on with it. My biggest problem with the plot was that it was too sprawling and the old "hook" of the guy out of prison and coming back to kill the law enforcement heroine seemed lame and not used in a novel way. It tied the two plots of Ethan and Juliet together in order to get them together, but that was it. I think Neggers could have done better here.

There is a good sub-plot in the book with Juliet's seventeen year-old niece, a runaway from her mother who's come home to Vermont to turn her teen-age angst and vegetarian ways on her alpha father, Joshua Longstreet. Wendy is a nice counter-point to Juliet's hard core Lara Croft-type heroine, and might even be a good heroine for her own book sometime.

The plot swings from trying to decide if it's a romantic suspense, or political thriller. It's unsettling to the reader and must be disappointing for fans who waited so long to get these two great characters together. Ethan Brooker is a devine alpha male—practically a modern day Heathcliffe mourning his late wife and bent on self-destruction. He leaves Juliet with those oft used words men give: "I don't know what comes next for me, Juliet." Cough, cough.

However, like the wise girl she is, Juliet goes after him when all the gunfire and dust settles and corners him at his Texas estate. Sometimes, a modern day woman has to take that first step. It's nice when a romance can show a woman having the brains and charm to know when to do it.

Laurie Wood